Find Out How To Use Our Education Data For Your Reporting | The Huffington Post

The U.S. Department of Education recently released the largest and most comprehensive snapshot of the educational opportunities afforded to millions of students across the country. The new data include information on which students are taking advanced courses often tied to academic success, the experience level of teachers, as well as the racial makeup of schools.

We used the data to look at why some states are leaving low-income students behind [1] while others appear to have leveled the playing field when it comes to enrollment in important courses.

We also used it to create our Opportunity Gap news application [2], which lets readers find information on specific schools and compare them to similar schools.

Our news application makes it easy to point readers to profiles of specific schools or districts. Here’s our guide on how to use it, including instructions on how to share your findings from within the app, and how to embed a special link to it in your story.

What’s new about this data?

In June, the Office for Civil Rights released, for the first time, detailed information on the number of children enrolled in particular classes such as Advanced Placement courses and advanced math, and the number of inexperienced teachers at each school.

We had early access to the data and combined it with information on poverty, using the percentage of students in each school who were eligible for the government’s free and reduced-price lunch program. Our analysis included data on all schools in districts with at least 3,000 students, which account for more than three-quarters of all students in the U.S. Read our complete methodology for more details [4].

Here are some tips for analyzing the data to generate story ideas in your state or district.

Start by looking at how your state compares to others.

The graphic on the left-hand side of our main Opportunity Gap [5] page illustrates the statistical analysis we did to see how strong the relationship was in each state between poverty and enrollment in five programs: AP courses, gifted-and-talented programs, advanced math, physics and chemistry. The darker the shading, the likelier it is that children in wealthier schools are enrolled in that kind of class, compared with children at low-income schools.

The courses included in our analysis have been associated with academic success [6], including high school graduation and college attendance. States where low-income children often miss out on advanced courses are said to have an “opportunity gap.”

As you’ll see, clicking on “chemistry” brings North Dakota to the top of the list, which indicates that high-poverty schools in the state offer less access to chemistry classes than wealthier schools. If you select “AP courses,” you’ll see that Oklahoma and Kansas shoot to the top of the list, meaning that there’s a stronger relationship in those states between poverty and whether kids are enrolled in AP courses.